Where is the biggest bengal tigers?

[LonePredator]

(01-16-2022, 09:23 AM)GuateGojira Wrote:

(01-16-2022, 08:23 AM)LonePredator Wrote: But do the Sundarban Tigers mate or interact with the mainland Tigers in any way or are they completely isolated and restricted to the mangroves?

Actually, Sundarbans tigers are completelly isolated and did not interact with mainland tigers. I have the genetic study from Singh et al. (2015) and this is part of they conclutions:

"Demographic analyses suggest that Sundarbans tigers have diverged recently from peninsular tiger population within last 2000 years. Sundarbans tigers are the most divergent group of Bengal tigers, and ecologically nonexchangeable with other tiger populations, and thus should be managed as a separate “evolutionarily significant unit” (ESU) following the adaptive evolutionary conservation (AEC) concept."

This means that Sundarbans tigers are not different enough to be classified as a different "subspecies", but they are different enough to be classified as a different "population". It seems that is the case with all modern "subspecies" but I will try to discuss this latter. To give you an idea of the significance of the conclution of Singh et al. (2015), remember that the Amur tiger was separated from the Caspian tiger at only about 200 years and they are already classified as a distinct subspecies by classic Zoologists (Driscoll et al., 2009). This means that Caspian and Amur tigers are more related than Sundarbans with mainland tigers. However, as most of genetic studies ignore this fact, Sundarbans tigers are still classiffied as Panthera tigris tigris - Bengal tiger.

Thank you! And yes I totally agree, the way subspecies are separately classified gets really confusing in such instances.

And I am guessing that living in the 'islands' of Sundarbans might be a reason why the Sundarban Tigers are so small in size. Something like island dwarfism maybe just like in the case of Sumatrans.

And with this information I think it is safe to say that when we usually say Bengal Tiger, we mean the mainland Indian Tigers, might as well just consider the data of the mainland population in such instances as the Sundarban only has very few of them and since the Sundarban ones are so different in size

And yes, I also read about the Caspian and Amur Tiger being almost identical. Although I'm not sure, I think I read somewhere here in the forum that Caspian Tigers are genetically indistinguishable from Amur Tigers. I don't know if that's the case but it's still shocking that Caspian Tigers were considered a separate subspecies from while Sundarban Tigers are not considered separate from Indian Tigers Reply